Sunlight

The recently released game Marvel's Spider-Man has interiors behind windows in many buildings. This looks great and it seems to be done using a rendering trick: the geometry for the interiors isn't actually there and is generated using a shader. I haven't seen any official statement by Insomniac regarding how they made this, but based on how it looks it seems very likely that they implemented interior mapping : a technique I came up with in 2007 as part of my thesis research. I've never written about this on my blog before so I figure this a good moment to explain the fun little shader trick I came up with. Let's start by having a look at some footage from Marvel's Spider-Man. The game looks absolutely amazing and Kotaku has captured some footage of the windows in particular: As you can see around 0:40 in this video the rooms aren't actually there in the geometry: there's a door where there should clearly be a window. You also see a different interior wh...

Matchmaking is a big topic with lots of challenges, but at its core is a very simple question: who should play with whom? A couple of years after releasing Awesomenauts we rebuilt our entire matchmaking systems, releasing the new systems in the Galactron update. Today I'd like to discuss how Galactron chooses who you get to play with. While the question is simple enough, the answer turns out to be pretty complex. Many different factors influence what's a good match. Should players of similar skill play together? Should players from the same region or language player together? Should we take premades into account? Ping? Should we avoid matching players who just played together already? Should we use matchmaking to let griefers play against each other and keep them away from normal folks? If the answer to all of these questions is 'Yes, let's take that into account!', then you'd better have a lot of players! I've previously written about how many players yo...

I've finished recording a new composition! It's a cello trio inspired by minimal music (Philip Glass and such). Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . This contains the version for cello trio and also an arrangement for violin, viola and cello. This composition started out as something I was improvising while warming up for a Cello Fortress performance in Dublin last year. I had a lot of fun playing repetitive parts with varying rhythms and afterwards I heard from some people who were sitting nearby that it sounded really tense. Good music provokes some kind of emotion so I figured I should turn that little improvisation into a real song. Recording this one was a challenge since it needs to be so rhythmic and precise to work. It took me a lot of practice and editing but in the end I'm happy with the result. :) I also had fun making an image for this one: I combined a photo of my own cello with a photo of machinery I found online. Unfortunately I couldn'...

I recently watched Jan Willem Nijman's great talk on The Art of Screenshake and noticed an interesting YouTube comment to that video by someone named SquidCaps. SquidCaps mentions that for an unknown developer, it's really hard to find playtesters who actually test regularly. I agree that this gets a lot easier the more well-known you are, but I think it might also help to try a different approach to playtesting. So I figured it would be interesting to discuss how we approach playtesting at Ronimo and how to find playtesters. Let's start by having a look at SquidCaps' comment. It's quite long so I've selected only the parts that I'm going to reply to: Heh, "let people play your game and iterate".. quite a bit easier to say when you have plenty of gametesters already in the office.. For solo, unknown developer, having just ONE game tester that suffers 10 minutes per week is too much.. What you need is full game, with menus, high scores save games ...